Water is heavy

I just did an interview with ABC Radio Lismore about the latest proposal to divert water from the Clarence River to the Murray Darling Basin. Apart from the environmental effects (disastrous according to the studies I’ve seen) proponents of ideas like this seem to be unaware of a crucial fact. Water is heavy. A megalitre of water (worth maybe $200 as bulk supply to irrigators) weighs 1000 tonnes. Pumping that much mass over even a low mountain range is prohibitively expensive. You can overcome that with tunnels if the gradients are steep enough, but the Great Dividing Range is pretty broad in Northern NSW.

And, don’t get me started on the really crazy projects like Colin’s Canal.

Yes, this rubbish just keeps re-emerging, notably from Alan Jones of course. It relies (apart from an ignorance of engineering problems as you point out) on a view of rivers as mere channels for carrying distilled water which can be exchanged, at whim and will, between any two water catchments. The ignorance of the effects of mixing micro-organisms, as well as insect species and others, between two ecosystems escapes them (nor would they care if they knew). No ecological concern must ever be allowed to get in the way of big business/agribusiness making money by ignoring the environment.

Water from the Murray gets pumped over most, not all, of the Mt. Lofty Ranges from Mannum in SA to the hills reservoirs and from there to Adelaide.
The critical numbers, how much water, how far, how high, and at what costs [electricity plus infrastructure and maitenance] should be available to research savvy folks such as inhabit this site [ beyond my ability I suspect but I’ll have a go] and inform the debate about the Clarence.
And it would be interesting information in itself.

Good point, Factory. Of course it would help if we had several armies of slaves to do the grunt work, but the modern context is machinery. I think that in another 10 years tunnels for water might take precedence over tunnels for cars. In between time high speed rail might occupy peoples minds if we get another serious oil price shock as Peak Oil settles in. The trigger for that would be a sharp drop in the value of the $OZ.

I see the crazy proposal to pipe/channel water from north Queensland (Tully, Herbert, Burdekin rivers) through the GDR to the Thompson River, down the Thompson and then back through the GDR to the Warrego and hence to MD is also on the cards again. Bob Katter’s proposal to pipe water from these NQld rivers through the GDR to the Flinders River to use for irrigation on the Flinders even looks much more sensible in the light of the first proposal!

@Rationalist
You obviously dont get that public infrastructure projects can a) be seed financed by the public and b) employ so many of the public that it will spill over into their incomes Ratio and pay it back. No use not discussing public infrastructure projects when an increasing number of the population are facing unemployment and poverty here and in the US. An oxymoronic comment as usual unless of course you are taking the micro individual project view of the public infrastructure project…a classic error made by rationalists. If “the individual project isnt profitable it mustnt be worthwhile” That net profit to the government or no net profit matters less after paying wages to the newly employed. Part of profit went to jobs.

Couple of flaws in the “the Romans did it so we can to” argument. First, to my knowledge the Romans didn’t cross mountains with water pipes. What they were doing is bringing water from a high point, by gravity, to a low point, using aqueducts to cross valleys, and planning routes to involve as little tunelling as possible. Secondly, they were bringing water for town use, not irrigation. Third, the scale of things both geographically and in terms of population is vastly different to Australia. At its height, for example, Rome had about a million people, all the other Roman towns being at most about the size of regional centres in Australia today. The amounts of water they were shifting were relatively small.

And I come back to my biggest concern. Crossing the Great Divide takes you from one biogeographic region to another (as does coming from the Northern Territory. Biogeographic regions have distinctive plant and animal species as a result of more or less separate evolution over millions of years. Dumping the biological contents of inland or northern rivers into southern ones is asking for the kind of trouble that introducing feral aquatic animals (carp, cane toads, mosquito fish) and plants (water hyacinth) from overseas into our waterways has caused. And that is without taking into account the potential of the different bacterial and invertebrate species to have dramatic and disastrous consequences.

@Rationalist
Rationalist – try telling that to the Americans – and how you can say unemployment is low from a booming private sector when unemp,loyment is around 16% for 15 to 19 year olds and there are millions in this country getting one or two casual shifts a week

Ratio – I donty subscribe to BS about booming private sector unless you mean the miners who are about the only ones booming in this country (and the telcos and banks and grocery giants).

A lot of 15-19 year olds are unemployed since they have no useful skills or the skills that they have are not in demand in their location. They should enrol in higher education such that they can develop skills that the economy needs or move to where the demand is.

There should be no unemployment problem for 15-19 year olds. If those individuals had any sense, they would either have a job, be in school, at university or doing vocational education.

@Rationalist
Ratio – are you suggesting 15% OF 15 TO 19 Year olds have no sense?
Ridiculous blame game only you are missing the real culprit. The economy is as booming and wonderful as you think. Id like to shake the casuals, temps, contract workers, and others who are living on the margins of your wonderful world out for you to see (including the lawyers and other grads who are out there driving cabs).

I have heard that purely from an energy point of view, and ignoring economics completely, desalinating water is equivalent to either pumping it 1500 km horizontally, or 2km vertically. So on energy considerations alone it is always better to desalinate than to pump water greater than this distance (provided one is on the coast and has access to sea water of course).

@Alice
“Ratio – are you suggesting 15% OF 15 TO 19 Year olds have no sense?” –> Bluntly, yes.

People studying full time at school or uni are not unemployed. Unemployed 15-17 (or even 18) year olds should be a non existent phenomenon since higher schooling is provided until this age. Perhaps young people should be forced back to school if they become unemployed. Why bother supporting these individuals on welfare or lost tax receipts when the government cannot expect them to yield a return on investment over their lifetime from meaningful employment? It is all about mutual obligation.

In many ways the government agrees/will agree with me. As the labour market tightens and a body of young people still “unemployed” will remain a thorn in Gillard’s education agenda. The only way to move forward is to financially cajole some of these people into education through the tightening/removal of benefits. I have heard the current and previous minister refer to this kind of activity in interviews as the labour market tightens – it clearly makes a lot of sense!

Anyway, this is getting a bit off topic but it was fun nevertheless :).

@Rationalist
Of course the government agrees with you Ratio. Apparently to get unemployment benefits a school leaver must be “in trainin”.
Once “in trainin” with many private sector “trainin agencies” making a nice subsidy – hey presto the unemployed young person isnt counted in the unemployment statistics. A whole generation of schoolleavers left out of the stats. Of course the government likes it because it makes unemployment appear lower than it really is.
So what is the real unemployment figure Ratio and why do so many private sector training agencies need this subsidy? – if the market were truly rational the private training agecncies would exist without subsidies. The market is now exploding with RTOs who only exist because of government handouts.

@Alice
As well Ratio – how do you hide slack capacity at either end of the labour market? You decree “young people should be trying to find training” and “old people should still be trying to find work for longer”.
Should wouldnt exist if the jobs were really there and they are not.
Its a blame the victim mentality Ratio. Governments who have mostly been pushing neoliberal ideas like yours love to blame the victim. It means they can wipe their hands of any responsibility for underperforming economies and poor policy decisions.
Same with the recent electricvity hikes which is forcing poor people to seek food vouchers.
Whats the market solution there Ratio… ??
that these people should go and enrol in an MBA when they cant afford a tin of baked beans?
There is a bit of a reality check needed by the have mores.

@Fran Barlow
Hi Fran, that’s correct, the calculation is m*g*h/3600. What I was saying though, is that with current technology, however much energy it actually takes to push a unit of water up 2km (or along 1500km), it takes about that energy to desalinate the same unit of water.

Of course we could have the best of both worlds by first desalinating some seawater and then piping it to the highest inland destination of choice. Think of the jobs in constructing the thing, oh I can see it being sold to a politician now – PowerPoint firing up…

These important discoveries should be branded on the foreheads of the people who call for our Northern rivers to be diverted inland.

I remember being attracted to liberal economics during the early eighties after seeing free-market economists demolish these perennial proposals. Ahh those were the days when statists were much easier to make fun of.

Its a bummer that most of Australia’s fresh water drops in places no one much wants to live in, apart from crocodiles. But we shall just have to be brave about that.

From listening to a Zero Carbon Australia address yesterday there will actually be some occasions of excess solar energy capacity from any or all of the 17 odd solar thermal farms dotted around the semi arid regions of Australia. Linking all these expansive (wind and solar) energy farms will require a new trans-continental grid at a cost of many billions. But if the occasional pulse of ‘off-peak’ energy were applied to a few pipeline pumps on Katter’s scheme, it might be enough to get the folks in Canberra thinking real infrastructure spending.
Meanwhile I’d suggest the NSW Government get a bit more practical on removing diversion works and too many farm dams across the western slopes of the GDR. It won’t cure too much allocation of licences to irrigators but it might give them a bit of breathing space to get the MDB back into some balance

It occurs to me that the inhabitants of the Clarence catchment might also have something to say about the regional economic and social impacts of diverting their water over the GDR, which as well as being broad is some 1000+ metres high west and south-west of the Clarence.

Interestingly, if you run your eye across the terrain from Ballina NSW to Lyra in Queensland near the Dumaresq River in the Border Rivers country, which might be the dump point for desalinated water from Ballina, Lyra is only 374m, Lismore is 11m and Casino about 26m. As the crow flies it’s less than 200km.

Casino has about 10,000 people and Lismore about 25,000.

So moving water from Ballina to the Dumaresq ought not to be all that energy intensive and you might have markets for water along the way..

Of course we could have the best of both worlds by first desalinating some seawater and then piping it to the highest inland destination of choice. Think of the jobs in constructing the thing, oh I can see it being sold to a politician …

Indeed. What we need is a project. Lots of highly skilled jobs in rural NSW aimed at environmental remediation. Requires local steel and concrete, so the big industrial centres share in it. The stimulus lasts for years and effectively ensures the iconic MDB will survive.

What’s not to like? I’m betting the opposition would have trouble objecting to that one in the current context.

Fran, I’m not sure how you get an elevation of 374m for Lyra. I’ve cycled through there from Stanthorpe to Wallangarra (and vice versa), both of which are over 800m up, and I would have noticed if I’d descended nearly 500m from Stanthorpe and then gained over 500m again, all within a space of 38km.

I have heard that purely from an energy point of view, and ignoring economics completely, desalinating water is equivalent to either pumping it 1500 km horizontally, or 2km vertically.

Pity the Victorian government didn’t know or care about the first of these. The Forth River in north-west Tasmania is 400km from the desalination plant on the Victorian coast but for some reason the Victorian government seems to be completely unaware of the amount of energy the plant will use.

it is said that Girraween national park, adjacent to and East of Lyra has an average elevation of about 900M.

According to Google Earth, the lowest part of the Great Divide near there is about 900m. I think the lowest part of the Great Divide within a couple of hundred km of there is south-west of Killarney where it is 500m.

I’ve been awaqre of this figure since my first sorties into the feasibility of pumped storage, in the days when I was keen on wind + PS as a solution.

Sam is right on the Ug = g*m*h (potential gravity = gravitational acceleration * mass * height but that’s not really very serviceable. There are also complex calculations from footpounds to kWh but again why bother?

You get 0.272 kWh of energy by releasing 1m3 of water (=1Kl) at a head of 100m and consequently, in theory, you need the same amount to raise it back 100m again. A fabulously efficient pump might achieve round trip efficiency of 80-85%.

So forgetting about practical efficiency, to raise it 1000m (i.e 1km) you need 10*0.272kWh (= 2.72kWh). Raising 1 Gl of water to that height is 1 million times as energy-intensive (i.e 2.72GWh).

I suppose in theory you could recover some of that energy as it flowed down the other side of the slope to whatever level was consistent with delivering it into the Dumaresq, though of course that would entail a hydro station being build up there at the high point of the Girraween National Park, which wouldn’t necessarily be the most environmentally friendly thing to do. If you could sell that energy commercially, then the cost of delivering the water would decline however.

SAWater do sell electricity generated from water falling down the other side of the hills in SA after being pumped from the Murray to the dams.
They have been doing so for about 6 years I think.
There is a figure of how much they generate online, but don’t bother looking for it, its not much, better than a slap in the face with a wet fish but only by a bit.

Which means, assuming a pumpe efficiency of 80% and a height of 900m that 1Gl of water could be raised to the average height of the GDR (not East Germany! 😉 for about 3.06GWh. Raising 4Pl of water per annum to go into the MDB via the Dumaresq would be about 4000*3.06 GWh or about 12.24TWh or assuming a constant 24/7 flow of about 0.45Gl per hour, or if it only ran during 8 hours of off peak 1.3698Gl/h.

This would assume a power supply during that 8 hours per day of 1.3698 *3.06GWh i.e. 4.191GW … so not a small plant, especially when you are already doing desal.

The point is that if the plant had a capacity much smaller than this and scaled to something like NSW demand — say 1.4GW, it could fit a reasonable project (say 1PL per annum) into its idle off peak capacity. An extra petalitre for my Darling! I like the slogan.

Shiping water could be a cheaper option than piping. Water is shipped to parts of the Mediterranean and Middle-East. Bruno Oreste Bellettini Cedeño estimates the cost of shipping water from the Amazon river to Morroco at 41 US cents a ton. I don’t know how practical shipping water is in an Australian context, but it should make better economic sense than some pumping ideas.

Obviously if your pump is only 80% efficient then you need 25% more power to raise each Gl to the height needed. Hence 2.72 * 0.9 (the height) * 1.25 (the inefficiency adjustment) * water volume in Gl …

You need to put some numbers to it to really get a feel for whether the energy costs are significant or not.

A kilolitre of water weighs one thousand kilograms, and it takes 0.27 kWh of energy to raise a thousand kilograms to a height of 100 m.

In the Shoalhaven scheme, mentioned above, the water has to be lifted about 850 m. That takes 2.3 kWh for each kL. Assuming that the pumping and other losses make the process only 50% efficient, we’re looking at 4.6 kWh. If we can get off-peak electricity for 6 c/kWh, each kilolitre costs about 28 c in energy.

For the ACTEW proposal, the difference in elevation is only about 120 m, costing around 4 c/kL in energy.

Compare that to the $1.50/kL price John gave for desalination.

Of course, the $0.28/kL is just the energy cost, so we’d need to come up with some estimate of amortised capital cost.

The Shoalhaven scheme cost $128m in 1977, which is about $625m in today’s dollars.

Let’s say that annual amortised cost is about 10% of that, i.e. about $63m.

Before transfers from the Shoalhaven were suspended, the annual transfers were of the order of 150 GL/year, which was probably as much as was possible to pump during off-peak hours. So the amortised capital cost adds something like $63m/150 GL = $0.42/kL, for a total of $0.70/kL, or $700/ML.

This is just a ballpark costing, and the numbers can be quibbled about, but there it is.

John mentioned (from memory) a Murray-Darling buyback price in today’s AFR of $1500/ML, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. Was this a price for a one-off quantity of one megalitre, or was it a price for a permanent entitlement of one megalitre per annum? This makes a huge difference to the question of whether the pumping scheme would make sense economically.

You build a few little pipes, viaducts and tunnels to get the water to flow by gravity from KOOMBOOLOOMBA DAM (Elevation760m) which has an annual rainfall of 2.7 metres to somewhere in the Upper Warrego north of CHARLEVILLE (Elevation 302m). from Charleville it is all down hill and water already flows for free to ADELAIDE (Elevation 48m).

Hey presto you have got water to flow from the wettest part of Australia to the driest.

p.s. JQ water flows down hill for free. It already flows for free from north of Charleville to Adelaide with only 254m of fall. So water could easily flow for free from KOOMBOOLOOMBA to the Upper Warrago with 458m of fall; considering it is a much shorter distance.

The only hurdle is the greenies as everybody knows the Snowy Mountain Scheme would never be allowed to be built today.

You build a few little pipes, viaducts and tunnels to get the water to flow by gravity from KOOMBOOLOOMBA DAM (Elevation760m) which has an annual rainfall of 2.7 metres to somewhere in the Upper Warrego north of CHARLEVILLE

Ah yes Tony G., those greenies eh? What can you do with them – always getting concerned about ecological damage BEFORE it even happens, instead of getting the government to clean up afterwards as private enterprise likes to do. Greenies, can’t live with them, can’t live without them, eh Tony?

It would require in theory 2.72 GWh to elevate 1GL of water 1Km. In practice of course, it’s not going to be 100% efficient.

You get 0.272 kWh of energy by releasing 1m3 of water (=1Kl) at a head of 100m and consequently, in theory, you need the same amount to raise it back 100m again. A fabulously efficient pump might achieve round trip efficiency of 80-85%.

So forgetting about practical efficiency, to raise it 1000m (i.e 1km) you need 10*0.272kWh (= 2.72kWh). Raising 1 Gl of water to that height is 1 million times as energy-intensive (i.e 2.72GWh).

The figures Fran quoted come from frictionless Galilean world where commutation of energy occurs without any loss of efficiency. (Please don’t ask me how to derive the 0.272 kWh for the potential energy of 1 kilolitre of water at 100 metres of elevation. That was Galileo’s job, way above my scientific pay-scale.)

Also converting theoretical potential energy of gravity into empirical actual energy of electrical machines is not done by simple commutation. Therefore not very useful from the pov of practical engineering.

The relatively low energy density of pumped storage systems requires either a very large body of water or a large variation in height. For example, 1000 kilograms of water (1 cubic meter) at the top of a 100 meter tower has a potential energy of about 0.272 kW·h

1 mega gram of water to elevation of 100 metres would require energy of 0.272 gWh
1 mega gram of water to elevation of 1,000 metres would require energy of 2.72 gWh

Of course pumps are not perfect converters of energy, losing electricity through radiation. And pipes are not perfect conduits of water, losing viscosity through resistance. All of which would increase the energy cost of making the water run up-hill.

Of course pumps are not perfect converters of energy, losing electricity through radiation. And pipes are not perfect conduits of water, losing viscosity through resistance. All of which would increase the energy cost of making the water run up-hill.

Well yes, as I persistently made clear. The number you want, if you fancy the calculations for pipes is called the Reynolds Number. There’s a handy calculator there if you fancy doing the maths.

For the record, your discussion of voscosity seems to be confused. Viscosity is in broad terms about the resistance of a fluid to flow, between different layers of fluid. If viscosity was lost in the piping system it would flow faster not more slowly given equal amounts of force applied to it.

Tony G #50
Just a few problems with the Koombaloomba scheme – to get to the Warrego you can go either of two routes:
1. the one I mentioned earlier i.e. through/over whatever the GDR to the Thomson (Lake Eyre catchment). If you go directly west from Koombaloomba (the shortest route over/under the GDR) you end up first in the upper Mitchell catchment (flows to Gulf of Carp) and thus have to then go south through the Flinders catchment (also flows to GOC) before getting to Thomson. Thus you need to go under/over two more watershed ranges to do this. Of course once in Thomson you still have to later bring the water back under/over the GDR to the upper Warrego.
2. Maybe you could pipe/channel the water directly down the eastern side of the GDR from Koombaloomba but then you have to go through (under/over) watershed ranges separating the Tully from the Herbert from the Burdekin from the Fitzroy from the MD. Sounds fun!

In addition Koombaloomba is a quite small reservoir with its water fully committed to hydro power generation (and a bit of white water rafting for tourists).

I rather liked the Brisbane Institute idea of a few years ago of capturing fresh water at the mouth of the Tully River in very large plastic bags, injecting them into the East Australian Current, then retrieving them off Brisbane (or Sydney) and somehow getting the water ashore! They seem to have forgotten the presence of the Great Barrier Reef and its rather sharp corals but perhpas they were counting on the reefs to be all dead by the time this was necessary.

John Brodie with 2.7 metres of annual rainfall a couple of buckets would be a large enough catchment. Water finds its own level so a 650k tunnel on following the route on my link would more than do the job as it would have 458 m of head.

Quite right, I meant water fluid gains in viscosity through the resistance of the pipes to its flow. Such a fine line between gains and losses! I mentioned that most physics beyond high-school is “above my intellectual pay-scale”.

All I am trying to do is convert Fran’s figures to more manageable SI values. I see that Sam @ #41 has done the basic physical theoretical computations.

These theoretical figures say nothing much about the actual energy requirements to get water to run up-hill. They vastly underestimate the extra energy required to overcome losses through pump heat and pipe resistance. Not to mention the vast capital costs to embed this plant.

More generally its interesting how much intellectual ground a few people using simple arithmetic, basic theory and an hour or so on google/wikipedia can cover, at least in the basic economics/ergonomics of major projects. Its a worry when you see high-falutin consultants charging an arm and a leg to deliver bodgy reports designed to justify boondoggles.

Robert, water could be shipped to Adelaide for the city to use which would reduce the amount of water taken out of the Murry which would allow either more water to reach the lakes or more water to be taken from the Murry for irrigation. Articles on the internet tell me the price of shipping water is cheaper than desalination, but I doubt it would be cheaper than what the agricultural industry currently pays for water. At the moment we don’t seem to ship water around Australia, and there may be a good reason why we don’t that I’m unaware of.

Hi Jack, you’re quite right about the less than 100% efficiency. Fran has attempted to fix this by saying pumps are about 80% efficient, so one would multiply energy use by 100/80=1.25. That sounds like an optimistic estimate to me (which is fine, we should have an optimistic estimate).

A pessimistic estimate might be 50%. That would entail multiplying by 100/50=2.

Tony G your proposal will not work. This is because in the real world it takes positive energy to push water horizontally. With 1km of drop, you can push water 750km, but not further. Jack is right, friction robs the water of it’s kinetic energy. It simply won’t continue to flow without being pumped. For a human scale example of viscosity overcoming a downward slope, look at honey in a bottle inclined about 1 degree.

“With 1km of drop, you can push water 750km, but not further.”….” It simply won’t continue to flow without being pumped.”

Please explain why water flows by gravity from the Upper Warrego all the way to Adelaide about 1800kms (as the river flows) with only 240m fall ( 0.25km drop). I do not believe your 1 km for 750km hypothesis, please send photos of the pumping stations along the Murray Darling to prove your case.

Because SI prefixes may not be concatenated (serially linked) within the name or symbol for a unit of measure, SI prefixes are used with the gram, not the kilogram, which already has a prefix as part of its name.

The use of grams as a base unit of measurement in mass prevents clumsy constructions such as “(1 gigalitre is 1 gigakilograms)”, which marred Sam’s otherwise admirable calculation.

The efficiency of pumping water is roughly 75%. But an important factor to consider is water loss. Some water will be lost when pumped through pipes, just how much depending upon their quality and the distance, and if water is pumped into a river system more will be lost to evaporation and seepage into aquifiers. (But note that aquifiers may be the best place to store the water in many cases, especially as improved solar and wind power technology is lowering the energy cost of pumping it out for remote farmers. We could be better off if we stored less water in dams to reduce evapouration loss and allowed more filling of aquifiers.)

Australia looses billions of litres of usable water a year due to leaky pipes but great strides have been taken in improving this situation, as this news article attests:

We might be better off putting money into efficiency using the water that is currently available rather than trying to pump it vast distances, but I’m afraid I’d have to look into this in more detail before I develop an opinon on what should actually be done.

But an important factor to consider is water loss. Some water will be lost when pumped through pipes, just how much depending upon their quality and the distance, and if water is pumped into a river system more will be lost to evaporation and seepage into aquifers. (But note that aquifers may be the best place to store the water in many cases

Once aquifers are recharged the losses will decline. Yes some will be “lost” to evaporation but that’s not the same as saying that it is lost to the whole system. The water doesn’t vanish.

Australia loses billions of litres of usable water a year due to leaky pipes

We might be better off putting money into efficiency using the water that is currently available rather than trying to pump it vast distances

We might be best advised to try both, and of course to crack down on people pilfering the water on its way to the river.

Presumably these pipes would not be so leaky because they would be newly built.

@Fran Barlow
Perhaps you would like a nice little modern nuclear reactor to push the water uphill Fran?
Or perhaps you would rather an efficient pricing model to ensure that the poor cant afford hyrdation (whats the point of having those who cant afford water drinking it – after all, everyone has their own choices and makes their own life and if they are not successful enough they deserve to be starved of a water suppy).
You claim to be “leftist” ha, yet you also push nuclear and you also push market pricing models and you also rail against people “pilfering” water on the way down.
No of course they shouldnt pilfer water – they should pay for it right?
Hope you have a big enough security and police force when market solutions come in for water.
What other market solutions do you offer in the name of “leftist views” and “rightist efficiency” Fran?

I was wondering if water could be shipped in to Adelaide from Tasmania. Tasmania has 12% of Australia’s freshwater resources despite having only 0.9% of the land area. As a result, where rivers meet the sea, in winter fresh water actually flows out of rivers and into the ocean. Technically it would be possible to take advantage of this hydrological oddity and ship (or tow in huge plastic bags) water to Adelaide. If desired, it would even be possible to use sail to transport water due to the strong winds in the area.

I also wondered if it would be possible to ship water from New Zealand, but unfortunately they have a lot of Didymosphenia geminata or rock snot, which is a rather nasty type of algae.

@Jack Strocchi
Hi Jack, i know what you mean here, it is clumsy but the kilogram is the unit to use unfortunately. 1 gram is just too small. Back when they were defining these things they should have said a litre of water weighed 1 gram, but now we’re stuck with it. All the other SI derivatives are based on the kilogram.

Perhaps you would like a nice little modern nuclear reactor to push the water uphill Fran?

Yes because it is better than using coal, which is what we do now.

Or perhaps you would rather an efficient pricing model to ensure that the poor can’t afford hydration

Strawfigure. We are discussing irrigation and industrial usage, not drinking.

You claim to be “leftist” ha, yet you also push nuclear

They aren’t mutually exclusive. Leftists once “pushed” coal. Coal mining was filled with targets of leftist sympathy. Now some leftists are pushing something better than coal.

you also push market pricing models

Yes. One of the reasons we have a money-based system is that the transaction costs are less than is the case than with barter. It makes sense for money to be a medium of value exchange and a mechanism for rationing scarce goods. Equity needs to inform who has the purchasing power of course. Some benefits are of course best delivered in kind. What we must do of course is to prevent free riders, which brings me to …

you also rail against people “pilfering” water on the way down.

Quite right. The water belongs not to individuals but the commons. The water pilferers are stealing from the public and in a more direct sense, from others who are complying with the rules.

Hope you have a big enough security and police force when market solutions come in for water.

I rather suspect that unviable farms will simply leave the trade, and therewith the incentive to steal water will decline.

What other market solutions do you offer in the name of “leftist views” and “rightist efficiency” Fran?

I’m in favour of efficiency in meeting human need, which is also equitable but hardly rightist. Good policy entails good accounting and if using pricing is low in transaction cost and is compatible with equity, then I say let’s do it. We will hopefully do this with CO2 so why not with water?

Rational public policy is econoimically and environmentally maintainable, matches public goods closely with legitimate human claims in a timely way, does so with the minimum labour power required and without imposing unreasonable negative externalities on third parties. I don’t find that the least bit rightist and I imagine most rightists would be appalled if such were the way government worked.

I was wondering if water could be shipped in to Adelaide from Tasmania.

We can effectively do that already and it’s not very expensive (unlike desalination). i.e. pipe water from the Forth River in Tasmania to Melbourne’s water supply system and then use some of Melbourne’s current supply to feed water to the Murray which won’t require a lot of pumping or tunnelling.

Obviously this would include turning off pumping from the Goulbourn River to Melbourne, an idea foisted on us by the brain-dead morons who run the Victorian Government. Also, water can be sent from the Thompson dam through the Great Divide to the Goulbourn River as Ken Davidson at “The Age” keeps pointing out.

@Tony G Please explain why water flows by gravity from the Upper Warrego all the way to Adelaide about 1800kms (as the river flows) with only 240m fall ( 0.25km drop). I do not believe your 1 km for 750km hypothesis

Tony G, you raise a good point. Also, the Nile is really really long and it doesn’t drop much. I’ll have to reconsider my position on the physics of this.

I still don’t agree with your scheme on environmental grounds. I like natural flows. It makes the country more interesting if some of it is wild. The unending cultivated fields of Europe depress me. Where is the adventure in such a world?

What sort of rubbish is this “I rather suspect that unviable farms will simply leave the trade, and therewith the incentive to steal water will decline”.

Thats nice. Have you asked them where they will go? On to unemployment benefits and on to public transport (because according to your prior road prising models Fran – these displaced farmers/irrangators wont be able to afford to drive on our “user pays’ roads.

Your type are dreaming Fran Barlow (and you call yourself leftist – about as “leftist” as our own dearly less than beloved Anna Bligh is my suggestion to you – and this is what you are dreaming about – that after you have have put down all your user pays systems and implemented all your “efficiencies” based on rubbish costings and “marginal farmers should be given incentives to get off the land and join city centrelink queue” policies – and you assume they will nicely be mobile and move to the nearest demand centre or they will queue in line at Centrelink and wont bother anyone.

Ludicrous and transparent… but to promote yourself as”leftist” here is the gravest of all insults to anyone who is even centrist, let alone of real left sympathies.

Then it’s just as well I’m not reliant on selling them to you. As you claim to be neither right nor left, I’m putting you in the confused category. Certainly, you are in no position to evaluate my left crfedentials.

You quote me:

Thats nice. Have you asked them where they will go?

That’s none of my business. Perhaps they will work on viable farms. Most of them have skills and there are shoratges of skilled labour. I like the idea of people getting training and becoming land stewards, with a right to live on their ex-land.

then comment:

I rather suspect that unviable farms will simply leave the trade, and therewith the incentive to steal water will decline

“marginal farmers should be given incentives to get off the land and join city centrelink queue”

Now you are verballing me in a medium where people can see that you are verballing me. This underscores what happens when people get emotionally invested. You need to stop lying to make points.

Take a deep breath and exhale several times. After you have done that perhaps you will be fit to post. You can start with an apology for lying openly about what I said.

@Fran Barlow
says, as a solution to people who no longer canm afford water rights for their waterless land..” I like the idea of people getting training and becoming land stewards, with a right to live on their ex-land.”

Nice but what market system do you propose will pay people to stay on as stewards on their drought stricken unproductive land they no longer own because they cant afford the water?

Wouldnt the government be better off decreeing it a national park and letting the Koalas be the “land stewards” Fran?
Thats how it will go.

@Fran Barlow
and actually speaking of being verballed Fran this comment belongs squarely to you

“I rather suspect that unviable farms will simply leave the trade, and therewith the incentive to steal water will decline”

What I suggested was leave to where? You dont know where. You dont even know they will leave. You dont even know whether they will just seek centrelink benefits in the town they have lived in all their life. You make assumptions that people can move, that they can relocate, that they can retrain, that they can remain as “land stewards” on land they dont own and you have no idea who will pay them ?(government or market) – none of them valid. They wont get paid.

Across the US right now there exist people who cannot leave thir homes despite having no job or one job loss in a two income family. To do so would crustallise their loss and they are grimly trying to hang on to their family home and avoid foreclosure despite loss of income.

Structural unemployment is said by the IMF to have risen by almost a dogged 1 % due to this inability and unwillingness to relocate. Can you blame them for being inflexible? Id say they are being perfectly rational.
Your ideas of people being able to give up, walk away and happily retrain somewhere and slot in where demand is, are just as nutty as any neoliberals Ive heard. You dont have a clue of all the uneconomic (and many economic) reaons why people try to stay exactly where they are, despite losing their income. Maybe their wife is a schoolteacher and still has a job. Maybe their entire family has lived in the town for generations. Maybe their dog isnt accepted to a retirement home. Maybe they have a new grandhild. Maybe they only just escaped life in an expensive city and this was all they could afford. The world is full of maybes Fran, not just costings and fully portable people.

I am not proposing opening vast new tracks of land to irrigation. We already have the agricultural Murray Darling basin. We need to increase or maintain the yields in that food bowl, give Adelaide more water and stop the river dying with a constant environmental flow.

Chris ‘O @ 28

The Bradfield Scheme was about irrigating Western Queensland, not getting water into the Warrego (Murray Darling). if anything Bradfields water heads to Coopers Corner and the Cooper River. Your 409m lift is required to get water over the ranges into to the Flinders river which would then flow into the Gulf of Carpentaria or be dammed and pumped into the Coopers River.

Once you have the Tully and Herbert rivers feed by gravity into the Burdekin there is no necessity to pump to the Flinders. If you want to get water into the Upper Warrego from the Burdekin; a tunnel or open cut can draw it by gravity from the Belyando river the short distance to the Upper Warrego.

Bradfield recommended “further investigations should be undertaken to accurately estimate the cost and feasibility”……” This included aerial surveys, accurate measurements of heights, river flow measurements, more detailed investigation of dam sites as well as geological and engineering investigations.”

Maybe the costs did warrant “pumping’ water into the Flinders, perhaps Bradfield thought Western Queensland would be a food bowl one day.

Pumping would not be necessary to get the water into the Warrego and it is a different proposition to what Bradfield was looking to do. It is theoretically possible to gravity feed the Tully, Herbert, Burdekin and Belyando Rivers into the Warrego and as such the long term benefits and low ongoing running costs would far out weigh the capital costs of building it.

Whilst I realise the idea is to catch water from flood rains in a dam in the upper Clarence, normal flows aren’t that huge. If impressions of the Clarence being a “Big River” may be justified down near Grafton, above Tabulam the entire flow most of the time could run through a 1m dia pipe with plenty of room to spare. I’ve walked across it at Paddy’s Flat numerous times, nearer to where dams for this purpose have been suggested and it’s often barely above ankle depth at a well used 4WD vehicle crossing there (no need for a bridge). During drought it doesn’t flow at all. It’s role as saviour of the Murray Darling, especially during dry times, seems dubious even without getting into the economics. Perhaps we should be talking about tilting the country as the Chaser team suggested, to get more water flowing west? As they could attest, these ‘schemes’ don’t need to have any basis in reality to be able to tap into the dreams of turning desert into productive farmland. Perhaps (tilting at or with) thousands of windmills…?

I also liked Tony G’s idea of making the Belyando flow backwards for its 600 km length uphill all the way! You would have to dam off all the tributaries such as Native Companion and Mistake Creeks so water didn’t go up the wrong branch, maybe temporarily only to allow wet season flows to still flow in the opposite direction to help fill the Burdekin Falls Dam (BFD). Of course you could build a pipe/tunnel all the way from Koombaloomba (or maybe more sensibly the BFD, a large reservoir with considerable spare water at present) to the upper Warrego but to take advantage of the gradient this would have to be underground most of the way i.e. about 1000 km. This would make the tunnel opened under the Alps yesterday (I think maybe 50 km?), which cost many billions of euros and 15 years to build, look like a minor project. For a more ‘sensible’ option, although still with many problems, why not look at a dam on the southern Dawson River in the Fitzroy catchment (i.e. the Nathan dam proposal) near Taroom which is, at least, a relatively short distance from the Warrego (100s of km not 1000s). I’m sure the proponents of the dam, a private company, would love to sell water to the MD at a reasonable cost! – especially since the water was to be used for coal mines – that low value industry which shouldn’t be difficult to compete on price with.

Something interesting on the realities of the Murray Darling allocation system by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy.:

The fruit industry, according to a 2004 CSIRO report used 2.6 percent of water extracted in the basin. The vegetable industry is even smaller at about half that … 1.3 percent. The four biggest users were, in order, dairy (34 percent), cotton (24 percent) and rice (16 percent) and beef (7 percent).

[…]

Between 1995 and 2000, there was a huge expansion in water extraction in the basin starting at a baseline of 9,300 billion litres and rising to 12,000 billion litres. The current figure is a little higher at 13,700 billion. Some 1,700 of that 2,700 billion litre increase was for the dairy industry, and about 700 billion extra for cotton with rice and grapes picking up a couple of hundred billion each. By 2000/1 the dairy industry was using about 9 times more water than fruit and vegetables combined.

[…]

The dairy industry got a 1,700 billion litre increase, bringing its total water use to 4,200 billion litres, while the fruit industry got a 67 billion litre increase to bring its total to just 310 billion litres.

[…]

The Guide to the Basin report lists the maximum inflow to the basin’s rivers as 117,907 billion litres in 1956 and the minimum of just 6,740 billion litres in 2006. The last 15 years have seen the lowest flows in over 100 years of record keeping at Wentworth near Mildura with an average during the past decade well below that of the long term average.